The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse - Incite at Columbia University

Colin Leach is leading a multi-disciplinary team that works in a trans-disciplinary way to better understand how Black Lives Matter—the meme and the movement—moves people for, against, and away from racial justice in the U.S. and U.K.

The team, including Shaunette T. Ferguson and Nikhi Anand is examining the unprecedented use of Black Lives Matter (labels and content) for online discussion of racial justice in the summer of 2020 (after the murder of George Floyd) in comparison to previous time periods.

With support from Incite, Leach's team is adopting a systematic approach to evaluate the schismogenesis—a phenomenon where discourse bifurcates into polarized communities—by investigating peaks in online discussions using large datasets, including Freelon et al.'s and Giorgi et al.'s Twitter Corpus, along with the ACLED dataset for U.S. protests.

This research aims to identify intervention strategies for promoting constructive discussions and shared commitments to racial equality.